Well pie hates you.

Recently a friend made mentioned idiots who scream out "I LIKE PIE" for no reason and it reminded me of how I hate idiots who scream out "I LIKE PIE" for no reason. If you ever hear anyone do that out of context (same goes for "I LIKE CAKE") then God, Jesus, Buddha, and the government, will support you if you grab that person's head, pull it down, and then shove your knee into said person's face. For maximum effect, run up out of a crowd and do it before they notice you. Then run away.

Thinking of getting a graphics tablet? You may want to not do that.

So I've had a tablet for a while (Wacom Graphire4) and recently started using it again, only to remember why I stopped using it. I know some people have no issues with these, but before you get one of your own make sure you get to spend a lot of time with someone else's. I used a friend's for a total of four minutes once and decided it was good, but somehow didn't notice how hard they are to use. I can't draw a box without it looking slanty, and your hand will hurt like fuck after 40 (± 10 seconds) of use. I don't know how other people avoid this but what I am saying is don't get one unless you are totally sure you will love it, because otherwise you will feel awful for having spent a lot of money on something that is basically unusable. I draw even worse with this than I do on paper, and my paper drawings look horrible.

Netbook.

Take that, Psion.

Merry Christmas

You see what I did there? I said it. I said the C-word. The word that no one dares to say in fear of hurting someone's feelings or being sued. I've noticed that people often resort to "Happy Holidays" or just "Merry X-mas." I think it's just the "Christ" part that bothers people. I'll tell you what, I don't practice Christianity or any of those religions that are differentish but have exactly the same beliefs, but the holiday is called "Christmas," so just call it that.

Anyway, you have a merry Christmas. If you don't celebrate Christmas, have a good whatever you do celebrate. That's about it.

Inflatable lawn decorations

Are they tacky or what? Sure, it's nice to have a giant inflatable Santa on your lawn, but in reality it's not nice and shut up. Plus they look like crap when deflated. That huge obstructive Santa goes from being huge and obstructive to a puddle of red, and I can't decide which one looks better.

Most people suck at Christmas decorations, actually. There's the tacky inflatable ones, then there's people who just pour a few boxes of stuff on their lawn and call it decorated. This looks like crap too. I'm not kidding either, once some house in my neighborhood did something that seemed a lot like that. There was crap everywhere, plastic Santas, reindeer, all sorts of stuff just all over that lawn. It looked bad.

What we're looking for is something that actually looks nice, which becomes more scarce each year. I've always loved the classic "cover everything in white lights." I don't mean it literally since some people do it literally and it looks like crap, but when you do parts of your house and yard to the point where it's like a gentle illumination, it looks pretty great. Colors are nice, if you do it right. A house down my street went with a candy cane theme and it looks really good. The yard and house has lights (in red and white, in that order) everywhere, then there are giant candy canes lining the yard with lights strung on them. It looks much better than it sounds.

I also think it looks nice when people do stuff like outline their house/yard. It's about as minimalist as Christmas decorations get, especially when you use something like a darkish blue which both looks awesome (blue is the best color) and doesn't light it up very much. It looks nice.

If I had the patience I'd love to decorate my house one year. Maybe I'll do that sometime, it'd look pretty good. But that's not what this post is about. To summarize everything, I guess what I'm saying is "if you can't decorate your yard, then don't."

Oh and I also don't like overabundance of colored lights. I just don't think it looks good, at all.

Why do they even make Alvin and the Chipmunks music?

Yeah yeah, I know they need to make it for the movie and whatnot, but no one actually wants to hear the music. Today I had the displeasure of hearing their Christmas song on the radio and it was awful. Does anyone actually want to hear this? 

What 12 days of Christmas?

Since when were there 12? This is news to me. Even the Jewish know there is only one day of Christmas. Was Jesus born over a period of 12 days? I guess being a virgin could have made childbirth a bit harder on Mary, but I don't know if it'd be that hard.

PS3

Wow, two video game related posts in a row? Amazing. Anyway, I learned today that Sony has stopped making PS3s with PS2 backwards-compatibility. On top of that, they have also stopped making PS3s that I will buy. Now if I ever get one, it will have to be used. That's disappointing, I probably just won't ever get one. Not that I really mind, there weren't a lot of games that I wanted in the first place. The 360 is so much better.

Wii.

Wait, have I posted about this before? Maybe. If so, I'm doing it again.

So this is kind of a random post since nothing really prompted it. But I don't like the Wii. There, I said it. I spent my childhood with Nintendo, I loved their games to death. I practically exploded in joy when we got our Gamecube, which was my first televised game system.

But now we have the Wii, which washed away Nintendo's previous charisma. They sort of still work the same, they still have a lot of exclusive first party games and they're continuing their old series and all that, but it just doesn't feel like Nintendo anymore. Maybe it's that controller. Moving away from the traditional "game controller" design may have brought in many housewives and old folks, but it's turned off most of the gamers. Motion control is fancy and it does make for some pretty interesting games, but a lot of the time the games feel shoehorned to the motion control and would be infinitely better with a regular controller. SSBB was wise to make both Gamecube controllers and the Wii Classic Controller an option, but unfortunately SSBB was just SSBM with less fun. But I digress.

I think the Wiimote would've been dandy as a secondary controller for the motion-control games only. That way, we wouldn't have all the games that could be good forcing themselves to use motion and then all the good motion-control games could really shine. Right now I am going to point out WarioWare Smooth Moves. I haven't played it a lot, but it's probably one of the best uses for motion control I've seen yet.

Now that we've covered the controller, let's look at the actual system. It doesn't feel, look, or taste like a game system. I don't know what it does look like, but not a game system. When you turn it on you get greeted with a warning message and then a menu, no fancy startup screen like we had with the Gamecube and no instant-game like with the N64. Maybe the controller not being a traditional controller also contributes to this. The packaging doesn't make it look like a game system either. Under the hood, it's underpowered, almost as if it's stuck between this gen and last gen. This definitely contributes to it not having enough good games, the developers want to put their best on the 360 and PS3 because now that the hardware allows, they really can make any game that comes to mind. 

Speaking of the games, how about them games? There just aren't enough good ones. Yes, it does have it's good games. But there's not enough. Mostly all they've done is made a new game for each famous franchise of theirs and then there's nothing else. No game companies are putting anything on it because there's nothing to put on it. So instead, all the little companies and non-game companies are throwing random crap at it. Nintendo's also made a "Wii" series, which was decent (for a pack-in game) at first but now it's just a collection of "hey look at what we can do." Wii Sports was pretty good for a pack-in, Wii Play was arguably better, then Wii Fit was just kind of "what" and Wii Music has no purpose. And how about them balance boards? Sure, it's another unique way of playing games, but I can't say I'm particularly interested.

Anyway that's all I have to say, unless I think of something and update this. Hopefully Nintendo will stop trying to be "advanced" with their next system and focus on making the best thing they can.

"Baby it's cold outside"

I don't know the name of this Christmas song, but that guy should go eat nails. He's such an attention whore, that woman is trying to sing a Christmas song and he's just there in the background pointing out obvious shit. He's not even singing, he's just going "baby it's cold outside" like she didn't already know. 

Dear Sony, screw that.

So I hear that Sony is leaning more toward digital distribution now than hard copies. I say screw that. I don't care how reliable they make it, digital distribution sucks. Maybe they'll let you download it as many times as you need, maybe they'll let you make backups, but nothing will ever amount to going out and buying the game, or owning a hard copy of it. Digital distribution totally destroys the fun of collecting games, owning games, etc. I know it's not a big deal at the moment, but if the entire community displays disgust at it early on, we can defeat it before it's too late. Do your part, boycott this shit.

Dear The Bangles, did Egyptians even walk like that?

Probably not.

Bawls

If you haven't had it, you've lived an incomplete life. I hope you aren't on your deathbed as you read this.

It's basically the best thing ever next to Dr. Pepper. It tastes awesome (and if you say it tastes like Sprite or Ginger Ale I will stick a lawnmower down your throat) and it is very caffeinated and it's great. I've had two today, I'm pretty wired right now. Despite it's somewhat low amount of caffeine (80mg per 12oz) it gives a surprisingly big buzz. Maybe it's because the caffeine isn't extracted from anything (the flavor and the caffeine both come from the guarana berry). Point is, it will make you shit your face because it is so good. It makes every situation awesome.

If you are a Flash-based website, I hate you.

Buggy, slow, annoying, hard to navigate, those are all words that can describe flash based websites. The worst thing about them is how many computer and tech companies are doing this to their sites. Sure, it looks good, but screw looking good. When I go to a website, I want to be able to use that website. Every Flash site I've used was hard to navigate. I don't want fancy animations or anything of that sort, they suck. Plus you can't use them on cell phones.

Even when they've done it right, like worked out the bugs and made it possible to navigate, there's still some issues that can't be rid of. For example, it is a law of the internet that every Flash based site absolutely must put all descriptive text in boxes that are hardly big enough for one paragraph (or one sentence from Robinson Crusoe, by the way I hate that book). This means that you have to scroll every other sentence. And if that's not annoying enough, you can't scroll with your scroll wheel because it's in Flash. So you have to hold down the scrolly-rectangle and drag it every few seconds. Then the low frame rate makes it choppy so you will lose your place. And if there's lots of text, you'll likely scroll past where you wanted to read since more text scrolls faster. If that's not bad enough, some sites like to animate the scrolling and give it ease, so it can't be too easy to scroll to where you want to. If you're on a product page, you can forget about learning of the product.

And don't forget that if you refresh, you're thrown back to the site's homepage. When the whole site is done in Flash, all the pages are in Flash. This can be fixed by separating different pages into different flash files and putting them on their own pages, but then you have to wait for the unnecessary animation and all that crap to load. Even on a fast connection, this will take longer than a simple HTML page. 

I know that at the moment the best way to appeal to customers is to blind them with fancy animations on your site, but unfortunately it sucks. Even Apple, the company who is most known for sacrificing performance for aesthetics (although they don't do it that much these days) has a straightforward, HTML-based site. They do spruce it up with lots of Javascript and Quicktime, but that's just fine. There's also Maddox's site which contains zero Flash, Javascript that doesn't step into page aesthetics, and it works. It works great. He's even mentioned on his website how he gets more visits on his simple page than any company who spends tons of money on having a Flash site made. Maybe it's because his site is usable. He's also pointed out Google. Speaking of that, look at Google. I'm not even going to say why that supports my point.

That's it, Bush. I've had enough.

http://gizmodo.com/5108642/bush-and-co-poops-on-free-national-wi+fi

I admit, I never had anything against Bush. My family generally doesn't like him, and my area doesn't generally like him,  but since I don't keep on top of politics, my opinion has always been neutral.

But with this one thing he's done, I've had enough. Hopefully Obama will feel different. Knowing what a cool guy he is, that seems likely.

Dear Metroid Prime Hunters, what the hell am I supposed to do?

For no reason I can think of, I've started playing my DS again. I decided to give Metroid a 5th chance (that's not a guess) and I am reminded of why I've given up on it so many times before. Bascially, this game leaves you in big, confusing maps without giving you any prompts on what you're supposed to do. You will spend hours checking out every orifice of every room, hallway, tunnel, etc until you find out what you're supposed to do. And still, sometimes you won't. Now I admit I have less of an attention span with video games than I used to, which is part of why I've stopped playing them. If any point in a game it takes too long to move on, I will likely give up on it for a while. That doesn't change that this game is confusing as hell. There is a "scan visor" that you can use to check out various parts of an area for possible hints on what to do, but sometimes that doesn't help and you're left totally in the dark. You don't even know if you should save when you turn it off because you can't tell if you've made any progress.

I think the absolute worst thing about this game though, is the demo. You see, I bought the first Nintendo DS very early on, so I got that free demo of the game with it. The demo was pretty great. It gave you a taste of what you were supposedly going to get in the full version. I loved (and still love) the gameplay style. The demo was really just "walk around in a smallish map and shoot things until you die." It was great fun, and I certainly wanted the game. The demo was such a tease though, when I still played my DS often I played the demo more than the full version. I know it's a little late for a review of this game if you'd even call this a review, but my blog is where I go to bitch about stuff. And bitch I shall. 

Bratz are discontinued.

Mattel sued whoever makes Bratz because of something. I don't know the detail and don't feel like finding a link, but point is, Bratz are being discontinued. This is awesome, maybe now I can go to the mall without seeing some 8 year old's thighs.

Energy shots

They're a nice concept, but does anyone want to pay $3 for two ounces of caffeinated goodness? No. There's no magic at work here, no super expensive ingredients, they just cost ludicrous amounts of money. I'll start buying them when they're about $.50, which is how much they should cost.

What the fuck is this shit?

Now Monster's Beats headphones have an in-ear version. I'll see if I can try a pair so I can criticize them as soon as possible.

Shopping carts. A curse, or a blessing?

So apparently people at places with shopping carts don't like it when said carts are left in the middle of the lot. And can you blame them? They roll around and damage cars and suck. And the employees have to put them back. But are they all bad?

The answer is no. Carts that are left in those long strings of dirt in the middle of lots are good, because people can park by them (or park near them) for added convenience in getting a cart. I say employees should leave these in the lot to give people this added convenience. Plus, the people just might put the carts back later. And in case they don't, then it's no harm done. So everyone wins. Just don't leave your damn carts in the middle of the lot.